Addressing a writer's only true failure: not writing.

Riddley Walker

I finished reading Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban this afternoon. It’s a great book, hard to read because of the dialect, but very well put together. And this ties into my favorite band, Clutch.

On Clutch’s 2007 album “From Beale Street to Oblivion”, they have a song called “The Rapture of Riddley Walker”, which was one of the middling songs on the album in my opinion; it was good, but didn’t stick out compared to some of the other pieces.

Then I listened to it after reading the book. Holy Shit.

The lyrics are thick with dialectical references to the book and to Riddley’s world…now this made the song harder to understand initially, but when you get the references it pops out at you. Being able to capture the emotion of a 200+ page novel in a sub-4 minute song is nothing less than genius, and now I can recognize how fantastic it really is.